Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge Biography

Birth: June 12, 1851 in Penkhull, Staffordshire, England

Death: August 22, 1940 in Amersham, Wiltshire, England

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

World famous British physicist and a fearless champion of
after-death survival. He missed no opportunity to declare his
belief that death is not the end, that there are higher beings in
the scale of existence, and that intercommunication between this
world and the next is possible. Lodge was born June 12, 1851, at
Penkhull, Staffordshire, England, and studied at University of
London (B.S., 1875; D.Sc. 1877). He was professor of physics at
University of London (1877) and at University of Liverpool
(1881-90) and served as principal of Birmingham University
(1900-19). Lodge was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1887,
awarded the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts for his
pioneer work in wireless telegraphy, and was knighted in 1902. He
was president of the British Association in 1913. His great
reputation as a physicist was established by his research in
electricity, thermoelectricity, and in wireless (radio) and
theories of matter and ether. Lodge developed the spark plug that
bears his name.

His first experiences in psychic research occurred in 1883-84,
when he joined Malcolm Guthrie on his investigations of
thought-transference in Liverpool. Lodge undertook similar
experiments himself in 1892 in Carinthia at Portschach am See and
reported them in Proceedings of the SPR (Vol. 7, part 20,
1892).

His most notable observations in physical research were made
with the medium Eusapia Palladino. In Charles Richet's house on
the Ile Roubaud, he attended four séances and reported on
them in the Journal of the SPR (November 1894), affirming the
reality of Palladino's phenomena:

"However the facts are to be explained, the possibility of the
facts I am constrained to admit; there is no further room in my
mind for doubt. Any person without invincible prejudice who had
the same experience would come to the same broad conclusion, viz.,
that things hitherto held impossible do actually occur. If one
such fact is clearly established, the conceivability of others may
be more readily granted, and I concentrated my attention mainly on
what seemed to me the most simple and definite thing, viz., the
movement of an untouched object in sufficient light for no doubt
of its motion to exist. This I have now witnessed several times;
the fact of movement being vouched for by both sight and hearing,
sometimes also by touch, and the objectivity of the movement being
demonstrated by the sounds heard by an outside observer, and by
permanent alteration in the position of the objects. The result of
my experience is to convince me that certain phenomena usually
considered abnormal do belong to the order of nature, and as a
corollary from this, that these phenomena ought to be investigated
and recorded by persons and societies interested in natural
knowledge.''

When Palladino was exposed in fraud in the following year at
Cambridge, Lodge, who attended two of the sittings there, defended
his earlier observations. He declared that there was no
resemblance between the Cambridge phenomena and those observed on
the Ile Roubaud. In the field of mental phenomena, Lenora Piper
was his chief source of enlightenment. His first investigations
with Piper took place in 1889, when the medium was tested in
England by the Society for Psychical Research. Lodge received many
evidential messages, which soon convinced him that the dead were
still live.

His first report was published in 1890. Nineteen years later,
in discussing the evidence for the return through the mediumship
of Piper of F. W. H. Myers, Edmund Gurney, and many others, he
referred to his experiences:

"The old series of sittings with Mrs. Piper convinced me of
survival for reasons which I should find it hard to formulate in
any strict fashion, but that was their distinct effect. They also
made me suspect--or more than suspect--that surviving
intelligences were in some cases consciously communicating--yes,
in some few cases consciously; though more usually the messages
came, in all probability, from an unconscious stratum, being
received by the medium in an inspirational manner analogous to
psychometry. The hypothesis of surviving intelligence and
personality--not only surviving but anxious and able with
difficulty to communicate--is the simplest and most
straightforward and the only one that fits all the facts'' (from
The Survival of Man, 1909).

Lodge openly stated for the first time, in 1908, that he
believed he had genuinely conversed with late friends and that the
boundary between the two worlds was wearing thin in places. Five
years later, speaking from the presidential chair to the British
Association in September 1913, he boldly declared that his own
investigations convinced him that "memory and affection are not
limited to that association with matter by which alone they can
manifest themselves here and now, and that personality persists
beyond bodily death.''

The widest publicity to Lodge's belief in survival appeared in
his famous book, Raymond: or, Life and Death (1916). The story of
the return of his son, who died in action in World War I, is one
of the best-attested cases of spirit identity. It begins with the
celebrated "Faunus'' message, delivered through Piper on August 8,
1915. It purported to come from the spirit of psychic researcher
Richard Hodgson and began abruptly: "Now, Lodge, while we are not
here as of old, i.e., not quite, we are here enough to give and
take messages. Myers says you take the part of the poet, and he
will act as Faunus. FAUNUS. Myers. Protect: he will U.D.
(understand). What have you to say Lodge? Good work ask Verrall,
she will also U.D. Arthur says so.''

The message reached Sir Oliver Lodge in early September 1915.
On September 17, the War Office notified him that Raymond was
killed in action on September 14. Before this blow fell, Lodge
wrote to Margaret Verrall, a well-known classical scholar and
asked her, "Does the poet and Faunus mean anything to you? Did one
protect the other?'' She replied at once that "the reference is to
Horace's account of his narrow escape from death, from a falling
tree, which he ascribes to the intervention of Faunus.''

The Rev. M. A. Bayfield attached to the incident the following
interpretation: "Horace does not, in any reference to his escape,
say clearly whether the tree struck him, but I have always thought
it did. He says Faunus lightened the blow; he does not say `turned
it aside.' As bearing on your terrible loss, the meaning seems to
be that the blow would fall, but would not crush; it would be
`lightened' by the assurance, conveyed afresh to you by a special
message from the still living Myers, that your boy still
lives.''

On September 25, Lady Lodge had a sitting with Gladys Osborne
Leonard. Raymond sent this message: "Tell Father I have met some
friends of his.'' On asking for names, Myers was mentioned. Two
days later, medium Alfred Vout Peters spoke about a photograph of
a group of officers with Raymond among them. Various other
messages came from different mediums, as did the
cross-correspondence on the Faunus message.

On November 25, Mrs. Cheves, a complete stranger, wrote a
letter saying that she had a photograph of the officers of the
South Lancashire Regiment of which Raymond Lodge was a second
lieutenant and offered to send it. In a séance on December
3, Gladys Leonard described the photograph, featuring Raymond
sitting on the ground and an officer placing his hand on Raymond's
shoulder. The photograph arrived on December 7 and corresponded
with the description in every detail.

Many other messages, bearing the authentic stamp of Raymond's
identity, came through. The most curious was one about "Mr.
Jackson.'' "Feda,'' Leonard's control, said that Raymond mixed it
up with a bird and a pedestal. The truth of the matter was that
Jackson was a peacock which, after its death, was stuffed and put
on a pedestal.

Lodge displayed the whole mass of evidential communications in
his book Raymond, including the reference to cigars and whiskey
and soda in the afterlife. Owing to this, many ridiculed the book,
although many others accept the idea that dead spirits can furnish
the afterlife with familiar associations of everyday physical
life. Some critics suggested that Lodge's bereavement led him into
Spiritualism, but his book repudiates this notion. "My
conclusion,'' Lodge wrote, "has been gradually forming itself for
years, though, undoubtedly, it is based on experience of the same
sort of thing. But this event has strengthened and liberated my
testimony. It can now be associated with a private experience of
my own, instead of with the private experience of others.''

The book Raymond was followed by other important publications
on psychic research in which Lodge elaborated his previous
conclusions. Before the Modern Churchmen's Conference in September
1931 in Oxford, Lodge declared:

"If I find myself an opportunity of communicating I shall try
to establish my identity by detailing a perfectly preposterous and
absurdly childish peculiarity which I have already taken the
trouble to record with some care in a sealed document deposited in
the custody of the English S.P.R. I hope to remember the details
of this document and relate them in no unmistakable fashion. The
value of the communication will not consist in the substance of
what is communicated, but in the fact that I have never mentioned
it to a living soul, and no one has any idea what it contains.
People of sense will not take its absurd triviality as anything
but helpful in contributing to the proof of the survival of
personal identity.''

He reiterated this viewpoint two years later in his book My
Philosophy: "Basing my conclusions on experience I am absolutely
convinced not only of survival but of demonstrated survival,
demonstrated by occasional interaction with matter in such a way
as to produce physical results.''

Lodge died August 22, 1940, at Amersham, Wiltshire, England.
His correspondence is preserved in the Lodge Collection of the
Society for Psychical Research in London.

The post-mortal identity test of Lodge's survival involved the
depositing of a set of envelopes with the Society for Psychical
Research and the London Spiritualist Alliance, with instructions
for consecutive opening of the envelopes. The packet in the
possession of the Society for Psychical Research contained seven
envelopes, one inside another, containing clues when opened
consecutively. The instructions were somewhat complex and, owing
to the war years following his death, could not be applied. The
final envelope with the test message was opened February 10, 1947.
No psychic had identified it. The test did not lead to the
evidence of survival hoped for (see Journal of the SPR Vol. 38,
pp. 121-134).